Tag Archives: Susan

From Spring to Summer: LDNA on the road

June 2016:
For the past couple of months, our rolling horizon has looked increasingly full of activity. This new blogpost provides a brief update on where we’ve been and where we’re going. We’ll be aiming to give more thorough reports on some of these activities after the events.

Where we’ve been

In May, Susan, Iona and Mike travelled to Utrecht, at the invitation of Joris van Eijnatten and Jaap Verheul. Together with colleagues from Sheffield’s History Department, we presented the different strands of Digital Humanities work ongoing at Sheffield. We learned much from our exchanges with Utrecht’s AsymEnc and Translantis research programs, and enjoyed shared intellectual probing of visualisations of change across time. We look forward to continued engagement with each others’ work.

A week later, Seth and Justyna participated in This&THATCamp at the University of Sussex (pictured), with LDNA emerging second in a popular poll of topics for discussion at this un-conference-style event. Productive conversations across the two days covered data visualisation, data manipulation, text analytics, digital humanities and even data sonification. We hope to hear more from Julie Weeds and others when the LDNA team return to Brighton in September.

Next week, we’ll be calling on colleagues at the HRI to talk us through their experience visualising complex humanities data. Richard Ward (Digital Panopticon) and Dirk Rohman (Migration of Faith) have agreed to walk us through their decision-making processes, and talk through the role of different visualisations in exploring, analysing, and explaining current findings.

Where we’re going

The LDNA team are also gearing up for a summer of presentations:

Justyna Robinson will be representing LDNA at Sociolinguistics Symposium (Murcia, 15-18 June), as well as sharing the latest analysis from her longitudinal study of semantic variation focused on polysemous adjectives in South Yorkshire speech. Catch LDNA in the general poster session on Friday (17th), and Justyna’s paper at 3pm on Thursday. #SS21
Susan Fitzmaurice is in Saarland, as first guest speaker at the Historical Corpus Linguistics event hosted by the IDeaL research centre, also on Thursday (16th June) at 2:15pm. Her paper is subtitled “Discursive semantics and the quest for the automatic identification of concepts and conceptual change in English 1500-1800”. #IDeaL
In July, the Glasgow LDNA team are Krakow-bound for DH2016 (11-16 July). The LDNA poster, part of the Semantic Interpretations group, is currently allocated to Booth 58 during the Wednesday evening poster session. Draft programme.
Later in July, Iona heads to SHARP 2016 in Paris (18-22). This year, the bi-lingual Society are focusing on “Languages of the Book”, with Iona’s contribution drawing on her doctoral research (subtitle: European Borrowings in 16th and 17th Century English Translations of “the Book of Books”) and giving attention to the role of other languages in concept formation in early modern English (a special concern for LDNA’s work with EEBO-TCP).
In August, Iona is one of several Sheffield early modernists bound for the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in Bruges. In addition to a paper in panel 241, “The Vagaries of Translation in the Early Modern World” (Saturday 20th, 10:30am), Iona will also be hosting a unique LDNA poster session at the book exhibit. (Details to follow)
The following week (22-26 August), Seth, Justyna and Susan will be at ICEHL 19 in Essen. Seth and Susan will be talking LDNA semantics from 2pm on Tuesday 23rd.

Back in the UK, on 5 September, LDNA (and the University of Sussex) host our second methodological workshop, focused on data visualisation and linguistic change. Invitations to a select group of speakers have gone out, and we’re looking forward to a hands-on workshop using project data. Members of our network who would like to participate are invited to get in touch.

And back in Sheffield, LDNA is playing a key role in the 2016 Digital Humanities Congress, 8-10 September, hosting two panel sessions dedicated to textual analytics. Our co-speakers include contacts from Varieng and CRASSH. Early bird registration ends 30th June.

Conference report: Diachronic corpora and genre in Nottingham

On Friday 8 April 2016, Susan Fitzmaurice and Seth Mehl attended Diachronic corpora, genre, and language change at the University of Nottingham, where Seth gave a paper entitled Automatic genre identification in EEBO-TCP: A multidisciplinary perspective on problems and prospects. The event featured researchers from around the globe, exploring issues in historical data sets; the nature of genre and text types; and modelling diachronic change.

The day’s plenary speeches were engaging and insightful: Bethany Gray spoke about academic writing as a locus of linguistic change, in contrast to the common expectation that change originates in spoken language. This is particularly relevant for those of us working with older historical data, such that written language is our only evidence for change. Thomas Gloning described the Deutsche Textarchiv, and in particular the recent addition to that corpus of the Dingler Corpus, an essential record of written scientific German representing 1820 to 1932. Gloning presented the useful definition of text types or genres as ‘traditions of communicative action’. In analysing such text types, or traditions, it is possible to map syntax and lexis to text functions and topics, though Gloning cautions that some of the most important elements of such mapping are not currently achievable by machines. This is a careful, valuable perspective and approach, which relates to our own (as discussed below).

Other research papers included a presentation by Fabrizio Esposito who, like the Linguistic DNA project, is using distributional semantic methods. His work looks at recent change in White House Press Briefings. Bryan Jurish presented DiaCollo, a powerful tool for analysing and visualising collocation patterns as they change over time in very large data sets. Vaclav Brezina analysed lexical meaning in EEBO-TCP by measuring differences in collocation patterns across overlapping, sliding diachronic windows.

What did LDNA contribute?

LDNA is asking whether specific concepts emerge uniquely in particular genres, and whether and how those concepts are then adopted and adapted in other genres. Genre is a fuzzy concept, representing categories of texts. Such categories are characterised by formal features such as print layout, phonetics, morphosyntax, lexis, and semantics; and functional features such as purpose of composition, reader expectations, and social and cultural contexts. It is productive to distinguish approaches to genre in different contexts. For Early Modern Studies, categories may be inherited in the canon, and questioned and explored in relation to literature, history, or philosophical or cultural studies; corpus linguistics, often seeks a scientifically reproducible approach to genre and aims to learn about language and variation; while Natural Language Processing (NLP)often aims to engineer tools for solving specific tasks. At the Nottingham conference, Seth illustrated his remarks by reflecting on Ted Underwood’s work automatically identifying genres in HathiTrust texts via supervised machine learning. He then laid out the project’s plan of investigating genre (or text types) by categorising Early Modern texts using the outputs of the LDNA processor, alongside other formal text features. This relates to Gloning’s aforementioned assertion that text topic and function might be mapped onto syntax and lexis; in our case, it is a combined mapping of discursive topics or conceptual fields, lexis, morphosyntax, and additional formal features such as the presence of foreign words or the density of punctuation or parts of speech that will allow us to group texts into categories in a relatively data-driven way.

The conference was very well organised by Richard J. Whitt, with a lovely lunch and dinner in which attendees shared ideas and dug further into linguistic issues. Susan and Seth were delighted to participate.

Operationalising concepts (Manifesto pt. 3 of 3)

Properties of concepts, from Susan Fitzmaurice’s presentation

This blog post completes our series of three extracts from Susan Fitzmaurice’s paper on “Concepts and Conceptual Change in Linguistic DNA”. (See parts 1 and 2.)

The supra-lexical approach to the process of concept recognition that I’ve described depends upon an encyclopaedic perspective on semantics (e.g. cf. Geeraerts, 2010: 222-3). This is fitting as ‘encyclopaedic semantics is an implicit precursor to or foundation of most distributional semantics or collocation studies’ (Mehl, p.c.). However, such studies do not typically pause to model or theorise before conducting analysis of concepts and semantics as expressed lexically. In other words, semasiological (and onomasiological) studies work on the premise of ready-made or at least ready lexicalised concepts, and proceed from there. This means that although they depend upon the prior application of encyclopaedic semantics, they themselves do not need to model or theorise this semantics because it belongs to the cultural messiness that yields the lexical expressions that they then proceed to analyse.

For LDNA, concepts are not discrete or componential lexical semantic meanings; neither are they abstract or ideal. Instead, they consist of associations of lexical/phrasal/constructional semantic and pragmatic meanings in use.
This encyclopaedic perspective suggests the following operationalisation of a concept for LDNA:

Concepts resemble encyclopaedic meanings (which are temporally and culturally situated chunks of knowledge about the world expressed in a distributed way) rather than discrete or componential meanings. [This coincides with non-modular theories of mind, which adopt a psychological approach to concepts.]
Concepts can be expressed in texts by (typically a combination of) words, phrases, constructions, or even by implicatures or invited inferences (and possibly by textual absences).
Concepts are traceable in texts primarily via significant syntagmatic (associative) relations (of words/phrases/constructions/meanings) and secondarily via significant paradigmatic (alternate) relations (of words/phrases/constructions/meanings).
A concept in a given historical moment might not be encapsulated in any observed word, phrase, or construction, but might instead only be observable via a complete set of words, phrases, or constructions in syntagmatic or paradigmatic relation to each other.

It is worth noting however, that concept recognition is particularly difficult (for the automatic processes built into LDNA) because it ordinarily depends upon the level of cultural literacy possessed by a reader. This is a quality which, while we cannot incorporate it as a process, we can take it into account by testing distant reading through close reading.

As well as being encyclopaedic, our approach is also experiential, in that the conceptual structure of early modern discourse is a reflection of the way early modern people experienced the world around them. That discourse presents a particular subjective view of the world with the hierarchical network of preferences which emerges as a network of concepts in discourse. In this way we also assume a perspectival nature of concept organisation.

Concluding remarks: Testing and tracking conceptual change across time and style

All being well, if we succeed in visualising the results of an iterative and developing set of procedures to inspect the data from these large corpora, we hope to be able to discern and locate the emergence of concepts in the universe of early modern English print. A number of questions arise about where and how these will show up.

For instance, following our hypothesis, will we see the cementation of a concept in the persistent co-occurrence in particular contexts of candidate conjuncts (both binomials and alternates), bigrams, and ultimately, ‘keywords’? (e.g. ‘man of business’ → ‘businessman’ in late Modern English newspapers)

And, as part of the notion of context, it is worth considering the role of discourse genre in the emergence of a concept and in conceptual change. For instance, if it is the case that a concept emerges, not as a keyword, but in the form of an association of expressions that functions as a loose paraphrase, is this kind of process more likely to occur in a specific discourse genre than in general discourse? In other words, is it possible that technical or specialist discourses will be the locus of new concepts, concepts which might diffuse gradually into public and more general ones? (e.g. dogma, law, science → newpapers, narrative, etc.)

What we hope to do is to make our approach manifest and our results visual. For instance, the emergence of a concept might be envisaged as clusters of texts rising up on the terrain representing a certain feature. And the reminder that they might not just gradually change over time, rising and falling across the terrain, but there might instead be islands of certain features that appear in distant time periods, disparate genres, sub-genres. All of that can be identified by the computer, but we have to make sense of it as close readers afterwards.

References

Geeraerts, Dirk. 2010. Theories of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: OUP.

Defining the content of a concept from below (Manifesto pt. 2 of 3)

This blog post features the second of three extracts from Susan Fitzmaurice’s paper on “Concepts and Conceptual Change in Linguistic DNA”. (See previous post.)

Before tackling the problem of actually defining the content of a concept ‘from below’, we need to imagine ourselves into the position of being able to recognize the emergence of material that is a candidate for being considered a concept. Let’s briefly consider the question of ‘when is a concept’; in other words, how will we recognize something that is relevant, resonant and important in historical, cultural and political terms for our periods of interest?

In a manner that is not trivial, we want our research process to perform the discovery work of an innocent reader, a reader who approaches a universe of discourse without an agenda, but with a will to discover what the text yields up as worthy of notice. This innocent reader is an ideal reader of course; as humans are pattern finders, pattern matchers and meaning makers, it is virtually impossible to imagine a process that is truly ab initio. Indeed, a situation in which the reader is not primed to notice specific features, characteristics or meanings by the cotext or broader context is rare indeed.

The aim is for our processes to imitate the intuitive, intelligent scanning that human readers perform as they survey the universe of discourse in which they are interested (literary and historical documents). We assume that readers gradually begin to notice patterns, perhaps prominent combinations or associations, patterns that appear in juxtaposition in some places and in connection in others (Divjak & Gries, 2012). The key process is the noticing in the text the formation of ideas that gather cohesion and content in linguistic expression. We hypothesize that in the process of noticing, the reader begins to attribute increasing weight to the meanings they locate in the text. One model for this hypothesis is the experience of the foreign language learner who reads a text with her attention drawn to the expressions she recognises and can construe.

The principal problem posed by our project is therefore to extract from the discourse stuff that we might be able to discern as potential concepts. In other words, we aim to identify a concept from the discourse inwards by inspecting the language instead of defining a concept from its content outward (i.e. starting with a term and discerning its meaning). If we move from the discourse inwards, the meanings that we attribute weight to may be implicit and distributed across a stretch of text, in a text window.

Extract from Richard Wolley's 'Present State of France' (1687)

Extract from ‘Present State of France….’ (Richard Wolley, 1687). (EEBO-TCP A27526)

That is, the meanings we notice as relevant might not be encapsulated in individual lexical items or character strings within a simple syntactic frame. This recognition requires that we resist the temptation to treat a word or a character string as coterminous with a concept. Indeed, the more we associate relevance with, say, the frequency of a particular word or character string in a sub-corpus, the less likely we are to be able to look beyond the word as an index of a concept. To remain open and receptive in the process of candidate concept recognition, we need to expand the range of the things we inspect on the one hand and the scope of the context we read on the other.

The linguistic material that will be relevant to the identification of a concept will consist of a combination or set of expressions in association that occur in a concentrated fashion in a stretch of text. Importantly, this material may consist of lexical items, phrases, sentences, and may be conveyed metaphorically as well as literally, and likely pragmatically (by implicature and invited inference) as well as semantically. If the linguistic elaboration (definition, paraphrase, implication) of a concept precedes the lexicalization of a concept, it is reasonable to assume that the appearance of regularly and frequently occurring expressions in degrees of proximity within a window will aid the identification of a concept.

The scope of the context in which a concept appears is likely to be greater than the phrase or sentence that is the context for the keyword that we customarily consider in collocation studies. This context is akin to the modern notion of the paragraph, or, the unit of discourse which conventionally treats a topic or subject with the commentary that makes up the content of the paragraph. The stretch of text relevant for the identification of conceptual material may thus amount to a paragraph, a page, or a short text.

The linguistic structure of a concept has been shown to be built both paradigmatically (via synonymy) and syntagmatically (via lexical associations, syntax, paraphrase). For our purposes, given that the task entails picking up clues to the construction of concepts from the linguistic material in the context, where ‘context’ is defined pretty broadly, paradigmatic relations are less likely to be salient than syntagmatic relations like paraphrase, vagueness and association, perhaps more than predictable relations like antonymy and polysemy.

See the final post in this Manifesto series.

References

Divjak, Dagmar & Gries, Stefan Th. (eds). 2012. Frequency effects in language learning and processing (Vol. 1). Berlin: De Gruyter

A manifesto for studying conceptual change (Manifesto pt. 1 of 3)

As those who follow our Twitter account will know, Linguistic DNA’s principal investigator, Susan Fitzmaurice, was among the invited speakers at the recent symposium on Digital Humanities & Conceptual Change (organised by Mikko Tolonen, at the University of Helsinki). It was an opportunity to set out the distinctive approach being taken by our project and the theoretical understanding of concepts that underpins it. What follows is the first of three blog posts based on extracts from the paper, aka the Linguistic DNA ‘manifesto’. Susan writes:

Linguistic DNA’s goal is to understand the ways in which the concepts (or paradigmatic terms) that define modernity emerge in the universe of Early Modern discourse. The methodology we are committed to developing, testing and using, i.e. the bottom-up querying of a universe of printed discourse in English, demands that we take a fresh look at the notion of a concept and its content. So how will we operationalise a concept, and how will we recognise a concept in the data?

Defining the content of a concept from above

Historians and semanticists alike tend to start by identifying a set of key concepts and pursue their investigation by using a paradigmatic approach. For semanticists, this entails identifying a ‘concept’ in onomasiological terms as a bundle of (near-)synonyms that refer to aspects of the semantic space occupied by a concept in order to chart conceptual change in different periods and variation in different lects.

Historians, too, have identified key concepts through keywords or paradigmatic terms, which they then explore through historiography and the inspection of historical documents, seeking the evidence that underpins the emergence of particular terms and the forces and circumstances in which these change (Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte or Quentin Skinner’s competing discourses). Semanticists and historians alike tend to approach concepts in a primarily semasiological way, for example, Anna Wierzbicka (2010) focuses on the history of evidence, and Naomi Tadmor (1996) uses ‘kin’ as a starting point for exploring concepts based on the meanings of particular words.

Philosophers of science, who are interested in the nature of conceptual change as driven or motivated by scientific inquiry and technological advances, may see concepts and conceptual change differently. For example, Ingo Brigandt (2010) argues that a scientific concept consists of a definition, its ‘inferential role’ or ‘reference potential’ and the epistemic goal pursued by the term’s use in order to account for the rationality of semantic change in a concept. So the change in the meaning of ‘gene’, from the classical gene which is about inheritance in the 1910s and 1920s, to the molecular gene in the 1960s and 1970s which is about characteristics, can be shown to be motivated by the changing nature of the explanatory task required of the term ‘gene’. In such a case, the goal is to explain the way in which the scientific task changes the meaning associated with the terms, rather than exploring the change itself. Thus Brigandt tries to make it explicit that

‘apart from a changing meaning (inferential role) [the concept also has] an epistemic goal which is tied to a concept’s use and which is the property setting the standards for which changes in meaning are rational’ (2010: 24).

His understanding of the pragmatics-driven structure of a concept is a useful basis for the construction of conceptual change as involving polysemy through the processes of invited inference and conversational implicature (cf. Traugott & Dasher, 2002; Fitzmaurice, 2015).

In text-mining and information retrieval work in biomedical language processing, as reported in Genome Biology, concept recognition is used to extract information about gene names from the literature. William Baumgartner et al. (2008) argue that

‘Concepts differ from character strings in that they are grounded in well-defined knowledge resources. Concept recognition provides the key piece of information missing from a string of text—an unambiguous semantic representation of what the characters denote’ (2008: S4).

Admittedly, this is a very narrow definition, but given the range of different forms and expressions that a gene or protein might have in the text, the notion of concept recognition needs to go well beyond the character string and ‘identification of mentions in text’. So they developed ‘mention regularization’ procedures and disambiguation techniques as a basis for concept recognition involving ‘the more complex task of identifying and extracting protein interaction relations’ (Baumgartner et al. 2008: S7-15).

In LDNA, we are interested in investigating what people (in particular periods) would have considered to be emerging and important cultural and political concepts in their own time by exploring their texts. This task involves, not identifying a set of concepts in advance and mining the literature of the period to ascertain the impact made by those concepts, but querying the literature to see what emerges as important. Therefore, our approach is neither semasiological, whereby we track the progress and historical fortunes of a particular term, such as marriage, democracy or evidence, nor is it onomasiological, whereby we inspect the paradigmatic content of a more abstract, yet given, notion such as TRUTH or POLITY, etc. We have to take a further step back, to consider the kind of analysis that precedes the implementation of either a semasiological or an onomasiological study of the lexical material we might construct as a concept (e.g. as indicated by a keyword).

See the next post in this Manifesto series.